DOLORES – Review

Coachella, CA: 1969. United Farm Workers Coachella March, Spring 1969. UFW leader, Dolores Huerta, organizing marchers on 2nd day of March Coachella. © 1976 George Ballis/Take Stock / The Image Works

Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the National Farm Workers Union, the person who coined the phrase “Yes, We Can” (“Si Se Puede”), a labor organizer instrumental in leading the 1960s grape boycott, and a social activist for Chicano, Native American and Latinos rights, should be a name everyone knows, as familiar as that of Caesar Chavez, the other co-founder of the National Farm Workers Union. Never heard of Dolores Huerta? Many people haven’t, and that’s the problem the new documentary DOLORES sets out to remedy.

History seems to have a way of writing out both women and people of color, both of which describe Dolores Huerta. This well-made documentary goes a way towards righting that wrong in the case of Huerta. The film is directed by Peter Bratt (brother of Benjamin Bratt, who served as a consulting producer) and produced by Carlos Santana, who contributes to the vibrant sound track as well.

Huerta is well-known within the farm labor, Latino and social activist communities, if less so among the general public. The documentary spotlights Huerta’s personal and professional life, first as an organizer for poor farm workers in California, and then as a social activist for Mexican-Americans and Native Americans, a voice for poor Spanish-speaking immigrants, and for women within the male-dominated labor movement. Huerta has an unexpected personal story as well – the mother of eleven children, twice-married and divorced, and then in a relationship with a third man, the brother of Caesar Chavez. But Huerta was and is a woman who devoted her life to her cause above all else, someone who lived what she advocated, in the manner of Gandhi, as this film shows us.

Enlivened by music by Carlos Santana and others, the film offers archival footage of Huerta that also features such notables as Barack Obama and Bobby Kennedy, interviews with Gloria Steinem, figures within the farm workers and the Chicano movements, as well as her own accomplished children. The documentary is a bracing, illuminating tour of this segment of social change from the 1950s through the 1960s, and onward. DOLORES is a must-see for its tour of the history left out of school textbooks (or in Huerta’s case, deliberately removed) and for its shining a spotlight on a strong woman leader, a woman of ideas and action, a historical figure who deserves to be better known.

DOLORES opens in St. Louis on Friday, September 29, at the Tivoli Theater.

Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5 stars